Tuesday, March 25, 2014

In
a recent article on CNN.com Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at
Princeton University, laments that disillusioned young people may be losing
their faith in politics as result of their many disappointments with the Obama
era. Professor Zeilzer implores
politicians of both parties to “show that you can make progress on the policy
issues that matter to them and to do so through a stronger political process
that leads them to believe in politics once again.”

What might that mean to make young people “believe in
politics once again”? What are politics
anyway and why should anyone invest faith in them?

The political economist, Franz Oppenheimer framed
the meaning of “politics” very succinctly.

“I propose in the
following discussion to call one’s own labor, and the equivalent exchange of
one’s own labor for the labor of others, the ‘economic means’ for the
satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of
others will be called the ‘political means’.” *

In other words hard work, cooperation, innovation, risk
taking and free exchange are the “economic” means of producing the necessities
and the niceties of life. The political
means are to obtain said goods from the producers by coercion and force. In plain English, theft.

It can only be a good thing if coercion and theft are
getting a bad name.

The essence of the political process is the redistribution
material resources from the caste of tax payers (producers) to tax consumers
(non-producers).

As Murray Rothbard puts it:

“the government budgetary process is a
coercive shift of resources and incomes from producers on the market to
nonproducers; it is also a coercive interference with the free choices of
individuals by those constituting the government……. No longer do income and
wealth flow purely from service rendered on the market; they now flow to
special privilege created by the State and away from those specially burdened
by the State.”
Man,
Economy, and State with Power and Market: The Scholar's Edition

When one wonders why the political process is so stalemated,
it is because the cumulative government theft (federal, state and local) has
become so exorbitant that there is no longer room for leeway. Overextended governments want to extract more
and more from overburdened, unemployed and underemployed citizens.

America has calcified into two irreconcilable castes. It may have taken only a little theft to
sustain the State in bygone years. Now
it takes almost all that we have got.
Neither party offers relief. They
both take and redistribute, each to its own clientele. There is no room anymore for politics.

Friday, March 21, 2014

Vice President Biden labeled Russia’s annexation of Crimea a
“land
grab”. He may be spot on with that assessment. However, the bigger picture truth is that
Vladimir Putin is swimming against the tide of history. The trend in governance is in favor of
smallness and localism as opposed to aggregation and national expansion.

Throughout the world provinces and cities are agitating to secede from
larger nations. Legitimate secession
movements are budding even in what we might consider to be old-line rock solid
nations. In Great Britain, Scotland is
seeking Independence. Venice wants break
from Italy, Catalonia from Spain and to our North, Quebec is making separatist
noises once again.

Secessionist movements aside, nullification is
gaining acceptance as an accepted means of pushing back against Washington’s
heavy hand. On a cultural level, the locally grown / Farm-to-Table
movement strengthens local allegiance and identity.

The modern nation state is a recent invention. It absorbed formerly autonomous fiefdoms,
principalities and city states for the purpose of aggregating the massive
natural, capital and human resources needed to wage Industrial Age wars. Otto von Bismarck, who was the architect of
the modern German nation, invented the modern welfare state system as an
apparatus to buy loyalty and build dependency among the citizens. Murray
Rothbard explains:

“Generally, a State
cannot win the passive support of a majority unless it supplements its
full-time employees, i.e., its members, with subsidized adherents. The hiring
of bureaucrats and the subsidizing of others are essential in order to win
active support from a large group of the populace. Once a State can cement a large
group of active adherents to its cause, it can count on the ignorance and
apathy of the remainder of the public to win passive adherence from a majority
and to reduce any active opposition to a bare minimum.”

It is becoming increasingly evident from the massive
deficits, municipal bankruptcies and the EU monetary crisis that the welfare
state can longer afford to buy off its citizens.

Finally, digital technology empowers private individuals as
well as businesses to transcend national borders. In their visionary 1999 book, from The
Sovereign Individual, authors James Dale Davidson and Lord William
Rees-Moggs assert:

“The process by which
the nation state grew up over the past five centuries will be put into reverse
by the new logic of the Information Age.
Local centers of power will reassert themselves as the state devolves
into fragmented overlapping sovereignties.

Government will have
to adapt to the growing autonomy of the individual. This will make smaller jurisdictions more
successful.”

The point of all of this is Putin’s Crimean “land grab” is
strictly old school. Even if they manage
to annex new territory, their hold will be tenuous and unstable. Successful
and sustainable millennial governance will be smaller and more cognizant of
local needs as opposed to massive, bureaucratic and unwieldy.

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Tuesday, March 18, 2014

What little that I know about foreign affairs, I learned at
Camden Catholic High School and at the feet of Fr. Thomas Ploude, a former
student of Henry Kissinger at Harvard.

In his wonderful seminar, Fr. Ploude left us with two
fundamental principles by which to formulate a sound foreign policy. These are for a nation to:

1.Advance and protect its national self interest

2.Protect and defend its natural sphere
of influence

The sphere of influence for a super power such as Russia includes
its border nations, navigable waterways in its vicinity as well as the broader
European community with which it shares a continent.

In terms of national self interest, no nation can tolerate
instability and chaos, let alone hostility on its doorstep. From that standpoint, Russia’s heavy hand in
Ukraine and Crimea is absolutely understandable.

Traditionally, the U.S. has defined its sphere of influence
as the entire Western Hemisphere beginning with the Monroe Doctrine. We have never been reluctant to intervene in our
neighbor’s affairs when it suited our interests.

America’s Crimean crisis began in the late Nineteenth
Century with the Spanish American War.
Once the U.S. realized its Manifest Destiny of a continental empire, it
turned its attention overseas. America established itself in Latin America
via the Panama Canal. With the Spanish
American War, the U.S. gained a Caribbean stronghold Puerto Rico and in the
Pacific via the Philippines and Guam.
Separately, U.S. colonists in Hawaii staged an uprising against the
island’s royal family leading to U.S. annexation.

Under President Wilson, America squarely ignored George
Washington’s advice and became entangle in European affairs via World War
I. Our stated ambition was to “make the
world safe for democracy”. Instead, we
made Europe ripe for Bolshevism, Fascism and Nazism.

We haven’t backed off since.
Uncle Sam has established military outposts the world over. This means that our government believes that
America’s legitimate sphere of influence is everywhere. It is the entire face of the earth. The US of A is an empire with global reach.

The moral
justification for America’s global hegemony is to export our revolution, to
bring to liberty and democracy to the great unwashed. True conservatives from Burke to Taft to Kirk
will tell you that you cannot impose a culture of western liberalism on peoples
who are not ready for it. Nations will
choose that type of society and government that flows naturally from its
historic values and traditions. Our
century long foreign policy of liberalizing the world by force is pure
progressivist fantasy.

The phony Crimea crises

In terms of national self interest, America has none in the
Ukraine or in Crimea. They are not vital
allies or trading partners. Our government’s
main interest is in preserving the illusion that the entire world is our
backyard and we are the baby sitters.

Putin’s Ukrainian escapades have pulled back the curtain to
show the world that the emperor really has no clothes. Obama, McCain and Kerry can scramble all they
want to find a pair a drawers bit it’s too late. We have been exposed.

The empire is finished.
America has overextended itself and cannot make good on its threats or
promises. It is now due time to return
to our Founding Father’s vision. I quote
from President Washington’s farewell address.

"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent
alliances with any portion of the foreign world….The great rule of
conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial
relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible. Europe (at that time our only foreign land of concern) has a set of primary interests,
which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in
frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our
concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by
artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary
combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities."